Module : Psychology

Topic: Introduction Psychology

Week 2
Chapter 1
Human Psycholoy

Rakhshanda Shahnaz

Ch 1 -2
Lecture Objectives
This lecturer aims:
 To Understand Challenges of Studying Psychology

Ch 1 -3
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology
 Understanding and attempting to alleviate the costs
of psychological disorders such as depression is not
easy, because psychological experiences are
extremely complex
 The questions psychologists pose are as difficult as
those posed by doctors, biologists, chemists,
physicists, and other scientists, if not more

Ch 1 -4
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 A major goal of psychology is to predict behavior and
(Cont’d)
understanding its causes. Making predictions is difficult in
part because people vary and respond differently in
different situations.
 Individual differences are the variations among people on
physical or psychological dimensions. For instance,
although many people experience at least some
symptoms of depression at some times in their lives, the
experience varies dramatically among people

Ch 1 -5
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 Some people experience major negative events, such as
severe physical injuries or the loss of significant others,
without experiencing much depression, whereas other
people experience severe depression for no apparent
reason.
 Other important individual differences that we will
discuss in the chapters to come include differences in
extraversion, intelligence, self-esteem, anxiety,
aggression, and conformity.

Ch 1 -6
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 Because of the many individual difference variables that
influence behavior, we cannot always predict who will
become aggressive or who will perform best in graduate
school or on the job.
 The predictions made by psychologists (and most other
scientists) are only probabilistic. We can say, for
instance, that people who score higher on an
intelligence test will, on average, do better than people
who score lower on the same test,

Ch 1 -7
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 but we cannot make very accurate predictions about
exactly how any one person will perform
 Another reason that it is difficult to predict behavior is
that almost all behavior is multiply determined, or
produced by many factors. And these factors occur at
different levels of explanation
 We have seen, for instance, that depression is caused
by lower-level genetic factors, by medium-level personal
factors, and by higher-level social and cultural factors.

Ch 1 -8
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 You should always be skeptical about people who
attempt to explain important human behaviors,
such as violence, child abuse, poverty, anxiety, or
depression, in terms of a single cause
 Furthermore, these multiple causes are not
independent of one another; they are associated
such that when one cause is present other
causes tend to be present as well. This overlap
makes it difficult to pinpoint which cause or
causes are operating.

Ch 1 -9
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 For instance, some people may be depressed
because of biological imbalances in neurotransmitters
in their brain.
 The resulting depression may lead them to act more
negatively toward other people around them, which
then leads those other people to respond more
negatively to them, which then increases their
depression
 As a result, the biological determinants of depression
become intertwined with the social responses of other
people, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of
each cause
Ch 1 -10
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 Another difficulty in studying psychology is that much
human behavior is caused by factors that are outside our
conscious awareness, making it impossible for us, as
individuals, to really understand them
 The role of unconscious processes was emphasized in
the theorizing of the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939), who argued that many psychological
disorders were caused by memories that we have
repressed and thus remain outside our consciousness.

Ch 1 -11
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 Unconscious processes will be an important part of our
study of psychology, and we will see that current
research has supported many of Freud’s ideas about the
importance of the unconscious in guiding behavior

Ch 1 -12
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 KEY TAKEAWAYS
 • Psychology is the scientific study of mind
and behavior. • Though it is easy to think that
everyday situations have commonsense
answers, scientific studies have found that
people are not always as good at predicting
outcomes as they think they are

Ch 1 -13
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 • The hindsight bias leads us to think that we could have
predicted events that we actually could not have
predicted
 • People are frequently unaware of the causes of their
own behaviors
 • Psychologists use the scientific method to collect,
analyze, and interpret evidence

Ch 1 -14
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
• Employing the scientific method allows the scientist to
collect empirical data objectively, which adds to the
accumulation of scientific knowledge
• Psychological phenomena are complex, and making
predictions about them is difficult because of individual
differences and because they are multiply determined at
different levels of explanation.

Ch 1 -15
 The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
Consider your emotions right now
Search causes of your emotions

How can you control you emotions

How can you manage emotions

Ch 1 -16
The Challenges of Studying
Psychology (Cont’d)
 Consider a behavior that you find to be important and
think about its potential causes at different levels of
explanation
 How do you think psychologists would study this
behavior?

Ch 1 -17
 Any question
afifanukhat@uosahiwal.edu.pk

Ch 1 -18
Many Thanks

Ch 1 -19